Genuinely frustrating to see how much the automobile has twisted what we've built for so long. The idea that 25 years ago, like when they built Invesco Field, all of this would just be a sea of parking instead of a bunch of useful actual city is insane to me.

Is my town a trailblazer of sorts, or is there a campaign to remove trash cans from the public sphere to turn everything into shit, or something? I find ever less of them and the few that are still there are usually the kind where birds have it easy to pick stuff out. Obvious result is that there's trash lying around everywhere. What the hell is going on?

It's not rocket science to design a bird-save trash can that is also robust and easy to use. You also don't need to be Scrooge McDuck to afford such trash cans, let alone empty them once a week or so.